


work in progress (growing pains)

by spacenarwhal



Series: we make this road by walking [4]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Families of Choice, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Unconventional Families, Vietnam War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-02
Updated: 2016-09-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 15:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7940143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Later, too many years and countless fights later, someone will take the time to explain what is happening to him. Alex will twitch like a lab rat, jumpy and unsure, eye the two men who stand before him in the narrow cell door, as mismatched a pair as he’s ever seen, weigh his chances of knocking them both out and making a run for it. One of the men, genial and gentle and just a touch condescending, will tell him not to be afraid. It’ll be too late by then of course, and maybe it’s Erik who will understand it best, how Alex’s fear has already metastasized into a terminal infliction.</p>
            </blockquote>





	work in progress (growing pains)

**Author's Note:**

> I did far too much math to figure out the timeline for this fic but fair warning, math's never been my strong suit.

It starts with fire.

-

Later, too many years and countless fights later, someone will take the time to explain what is happening to him. Alex will twitch like a lab rat, jumpy and unsure, eye the two men who stand before him in the narrow cell door, as mismatched a pair as he’s ever seen, weigh his chances of knocking them both out and making a run for it. One of the men, genial and gentle and just a touch condescending, will tell him not to be afraid.

It’ll be too late by then of course, and maybe it’s Erik who will understand it best, how Alex’s fear has already metastasized into a terminal infliction, only partially misdiagnosed as the anger that burns in his gut and aches in his knuckles.

-

He’s sixteen. Summer is already breathing down his neck though it’s only May. School sucks in that singular way only high school can and he feels—has felt, for weeks now, months, maybe years—like there’s an itch trapped beneath his skin, something bone-deep and exhaustive. Sometimes it wakes him in the middle of the night, fingers clenched around his blankets and sheets damp with sweat. His whole body feels like it’s burning, his eyes spring open and he’s honestly surprised the whole bed hasn’t gone up in flames that his skin hasn’t blistered and peeled right off his bones.

In school they make them sit through slides in stuffy, dimly lit classrooms where some asshole always cracks up over the word testicles and the health teacher looks like he would rather be anywhere else, just like the rest of them, instead of slowly suffocating inside, choking on air thick with chalk dust. He talks about their changing bodies and new urges and drones the word manhood and someone in the back giggles, sets Alex on edge. He wonders if everyone feels like this, if this—the stifling heat, the crushing pressure that sits low in his gut and gnashes up his insides—is how everyone else feels. It seems doubtful. 

He’s sixteen and his parents are alright, he guesses, for parents. His dad served in the army and he’s always dropping hints about Alex enlisting though Mom’s mouth pinches and she usually turns the conversation around to whatever Alex is learning in school. “So hot, my brain’s too cooked through to learn anything.” He grouses, petulant and surly with adolescence. Later he’ll think back and be amazed, that he was ever so young, so _stupid_ , so much in the dark when he was already gearing up for ignition.

His mom’s hand is cool against his cheek, soft and familiar and Alex turns away from the touch, skin pulled so tight it feels like it’s gonna rip wide open and all his insides will just come pouring out. 

His sixteen and there’s a jerk bag named Gary Johnson blocking his locker, standing there with a bunch of his blockhead jock buddies, trying to look intimidating and spook him for talking shit during gym and Alex is tired—hasn’t slept a whole night through in forever, heat keeping him awake no matter how many fans he stuffs into his room, or how far he chucks the bedding before stretching out to sleep—and his stomach hurts, his chest aches (he wonders if it’s normal, to feel like you don’t fit inside your own body, like it’s something you’ve outgrown). Johnson swings and misses, knuckles barely glancing off Alex’s shoulder and Alex doesn’t want to fight until he does, until he’s knocked back hard, metal lockers ringing out against his back and Johnson’s circle of jocks is closing in, shoving and pushing and there isn’t enough air in the hallway, in Alex’s chest, like his lungs are deflating and something else is rising up in their place, busting his ribs from the inside out.

“Just gonna stand there pretty boy?” Someone says, knocking him back when he starts folding forward—like a puppet with all its strings cut at once, nothing left to hold him steady, he buckles forward, tries to rein in whatever it is tearing him apart—and Alex opens his mouth to ask for help but nothing comes out. Just a choked wheezing sound that explodes into a howl, pain flaying him apart, pain in every nerve in his body, that dull ache he’s been feeling all along tripled, quadrupled, multiplied times infinity.

“Didn’t push you that hard.” Someone says, far away and very close all at once. Alex can’t hear them, sweat breaking out all over his body, cold compared to the heat building up in his skin, the roar in his ears growing and growing and he can’t breathe but he’s still screaming. Other students are running, sneakered feet squeaking on the linoleum, and he’s so _scared_ —

No one is going to help him, he realizes. No one can. Then he ignites. And his whole world catches fire.

-

“It’s not really fire at all.” Hank McCoy explains, strapping a stupid looking vest across Alex’s chest while the professor looks on like they haven’t just asked Alex to blow up the fucking basement. “Your body is constantly absorbing ambient energy that it then discharges in the form of plasma blasts.”

Alex doesn’t know about that, leaves the science gibberish to McCoy and Xavier who could wax rhapsodic about the crazy shit any of them can do and why they can do it for days. Alex could leave for a snack and come back and Hank would probably still be yammering away about why Alex’s messed up on a genetic level. It might not be fire but it sure as hell burns, glows red and ruins everything in its way.

(He thinks of Armando, eyes glowing like coals before they went dark, before he cracked and caved inward like the spent firewood Alex used to poke at with a stick as a child, when he used to be fascinated by how the ash could look so solid before it dissolved into nothing.)

“Whatever.” Alex mumbles, because it’s easier not to care. That he knows firsthand.

-

He’s sixteen and he runs away, turns tail on the mayhem and the questions and his parents murmuring in low voices, bloodshot eyes following him around the house. “I’m not blaming you.” His mother says time and again, “I just want to know what happened.” _What did you do?_

And Alex doesn’t know, doesn’t have words to explain what happened that day in the hallway, to explain how the world exploded but Alex was left standing in the charred epicenter.

So he runs away, throws some shit into his backpack and sneaks away in the middle of the day without a single goodbye. He tells himself it’s for the best, can feel that itch building up beneath his skin all over again and knows it’s not over. 

He still feels like a coward.

He teaches himself to live with the feeling.

-

“Does it hurt?” Armando asks, which is hilarious from a man who just took a blow to the chest, shirt in singed tatters, staring at Alex with a kind of neutral curiosity that is probably a little unnerving but Alex’s blood is still singing, his body vibrating with a giddy joy that practically sparks off his skin. Armando peers at him but for once Alex doesn’t feel like he has anything to hide. 

“Not anymore.” He says, flexing his fist but able to keep it inside. He’s getting better, it only took him two years of living on the move, of disappearing and steering clear of people he might hurt and place he could destroy. It’s still here, the dull throb of energy that he can recognize now for what it is. “It just sort of there.” Like a scar, ugly and permanent. “I uh, not as useful as what you do though, huh?”

“Hey man, I don’ think it’s like that.” Armando says, cuffing him in the shoulder. He’s generous with touch that way, like it isn’t a big deal to touch Alex, and Alex wonders if that’s a consequence of being indestructible or if Armando was just born with that deep well of stillness on reserve inside him and the willingness to share it with those around him. Alex sort of finds it more impressive than the ability to grow gills. “Both of us have a part to play. Me? I’m reactive. You shoot, I deflect. You? You’re the action. You set things in motion.”

“Usually just set shit on fire.” Alex mumbles, heat creeping up the back of his neck and up over his ears. Armando laughs, a deep, warm sound that makes something in Alex unspool; the tight knot of uncertainty he carries inside him goes loose and untidy in a way he didn’t know it could anymore.

-

“This is Scott.” His mom says faintly, like she still hasn’t shaken out of the shock of seeing him again after almost five years of nothing but a few short letters. “Scotty, this is your brother Alex.” The flailing baby in her arms squints at him with watery blue eyes, apparently already unimpressed by Alex despite their brief acquaintance.

Alex doesn’t really hold him against him.

-

Alex shoots and Shaw grins, teeth sharp and face bathed in the shadows cast by the burning globe of energy he plays between his fingers like a coin. Shaw touches it to Armando’s mouth and Alex watches Armando’s throat work as he swallows it, follows the glow of it through his skin, breaking through like sunlight forces its way past the clouds. 

Armando burns from the inside out and Alex knows what that feels like, to be eaten up by that heat, to have all your insides turn to ash and dust and death. Alex holds his breath, stares and stares and stares as Armando’s skin ripples, _adapts_ , Armando’s eyes fixed on him and Alex prays. _Just this once_ , prays for something to go right. _Adapt, adapt, adapt._

But Alex’s fire burns faster and hotter than even Armando can change and Armando shatters, crumbles into a broken heap, embers and soot flying up off the ground. Alex imagines he can feel the dissipating heat of Armando’s life brushing against his skin in the eerie stillness that follows the fight even as Shaw disappears into thin air. 

-

It ends in fire. Somehow what hurts the most is that it actually comes as a surprise.

-

He stays after Cuba. The professor’s house—“It’s a freaking castle.” Sean had mumbled the first time they pulled up the drive, “Definitely haunted.”—feels cavernous without the others, even if they barely took up any space at all when they were all there. Raven’s things are still all over the bathroom counter and Xavier isn’t going to be the one who cleans them up, stuck somewhere inside his head even if he tries to smile reassuringly at Hank and Alex and Sean whenever they’re in the same room. McCoy, blue and furry and angry even if he doesn’t say a word about it, clears out Erik’s things, though who knows where he puts them, the scorch marked basement probably. Alex dumps Raven’s things in her room, closes the door behind him and doesn’t let himself wonder if his parents have touched his room in the two years since he hit the road.

He never thought it could get weirder than it was before, when no one seemed to know whether they were playing house or playing soldiers, waking up at the crack of dawn to run laps with Erik and cooking dinner with Sean in the huge kitchen that could probably fit Alex’s old house in it. Now all the rooms are full of that prickly, eggshell silence and none of them know what to say to each other. Alex thinks about leaving, stares at his meager belongings time and time again and thinks about how easy it would be to walk out the door and down the mile long drive, hit the road and put this all behind him. But then he thinks about how Xavier forgets to eat if no one reminds him and how Hank will need help getting all those modifications made to the house, even if they’re only going to be in the parts of the house they actually live in, and he can’t leave Sean to cook every meal unless he wants them all to die from an overload of pasta and cheddar cheese. (He thinks about how Armando said they all have a part to play in this, and maybe this time Alex’s part won’t be to fuck it up, maybe this time he can actually do something to keep things together, just a little bit. Just until someone more competent can come along and take things over for him.)

-

He has these dreams sometimes--at the mansion, in the jungle, in the backseat of his car when he finally has to pullover and sleep--where his hands turn to stone and his skin cracks, limbs heavy and falling to rubble. He wakes sweating, all of sixteen again, disorientated and lost, insides twisting with dread he can’t put a name to. 

-

Toad tilts his flat face at him, blinking his odd bulbous eyes at him from behind the goggles that seem permanently fixed on his face as Alex pulls a blunted bullet out of his arm. It bleeds like a bitch but it doesn’t seem to have hit anything major. At least, he doesn’t think so. It’s not the first time he’s been shot out here but so far none of these bullets have had his name on them, though they leave behind weird sunken scars, like the inoculation scar he remembers seeing high on Erik’s arm, different from the bullet wounds he’s seen heal on other soldiers. 

“You’re a lucky bastard, you know that?” Toad drawls, rifle slung across his knees where he’s squatted in the soft, muddy earth next to Alex. His legs must be double jointed or some shit Alex thinks, just looking at the way his knees jut out to the sides. Serving alongside him isn’t anything like being a part of their short lived team, guns strapped to their backs as they wade through swampy flatlands. (When the U.S. Army finally got their hands on his whereabouts Charles had offered to find Alex some way out of the country, benign veneer already beginning to pull up around the edges with every passing week and empty room that accumulated, but Alex is still his father’s son, couldn’t stomach the idea of being a draft dodger when there were so many other guys who didn’t have the money to bail.) 

“Don’t be too impressed, it never lasts long.” Alex hisses, pressing what he hopes is a clean scrap of fabric to the hole in his arm. Toad’s laughter is a wet, squelching sound reminds Alex of: boots sticking in mud, the window in the upstairs study that always stuck when it rained, where Raven had gotten them all really fucking drunk once, the sound of Scott babbling around his drool covered fist. 

-

The first time Armando kisses him—it sounds bigger than it was when he says it like that, but it always felt bigger than it was too, felt like possibility Alex had forgotten the texture of by then—he tastes like cherry pie and Coke and Alex doesn’t know what to do with his hands between them, grabs at Armando’s arms and digs into the warm skin there for purchase. He feels like he’s hanging on for dear life. 

Armando’s hand is cool against the back of his rapidly-heating neck, fingers wide and palm heavy, but it’s a reassuring touch, grounds Alex to the earth, steady and still. 

-

The bullet with his name on it finds him, buries itself in his gut and he drops to the ground, body convulsing with pain, fire tearing through his insides and the whole jungle glows with the heat coming off his body. He can see it even with his eyes closed, pressing up against his eyelids and he thinks that the last thing he’ll see is the flickering glare of this thing he carries around inside him, that wrecks havoc and destruction and batters the world to pieces. Hank said it wasn’t fire but what does Hank know about the lightning-flash heat that pushes up under his skin, that pours off his arms and incinerates his heart and leaves ruins where something used to stand. 

Mud seeps into his clothes, cold and damp before it evaporates to nothing on his skin, and Alex can’t breathe, feels like he’s drowning out here, stranded on this island so far from home. He remembers the sky full of missiles and he remembers the wet splatter of human beings plummeting to the earth and exploding as they hit the asphalt and he remembers how the light went out in Armando’s eyes, still staring at Alex. He remembers and he thinks this is probably what people talk about when they say your life flashes before your eyes and he wishes someone had said you remember the shitty things so much more clearly than the good stuff, but maybe that’s a given, all those regrets floating up other surface as soon as they realize the clock’s winding down to nothing. 

Alex feels the heat run out of his body all at once, and he isn’t anything anymore, just a body in the mud like countless others around him. 

And then, like a firecracker exploding inside a clenched fist, he explodes, a sonic boom that levels everything around him (later he’ll come back to walk the circumference of a perfect circle of scorched earth, mud galvanized to cracked stone). He cries out, one hand still pressed over his bleeding gut. 

He wakes up feeling like a fucking elephant sat on top of him. There’s a field medic who reminds him of Hank straight out of the CIA’s basement, all soft-spoken and fumbling, dirty muddy hands covered in blood, but he looks Alex in the eye and says, “Hell of a shot.” 

There’s an ugly purple bruise extended over his belly, blood vessels burst and spider-webbing under the skin there from the dark heart at the center of the blow. There’s shrapnel embedded in his palm, warped shards of the bullet that he could have sworn had bit into his guts. The medic still hasn’t pulled them out. If he concentrates he can feel them shifting, digging deeper (or maybe being pushed out). 

“What the fuck?” He breathes before he passes out.

-

“They’re all dead.” Raven says. She looks like the cherub-faced blonde girl who first offered her hand to him a decade ago and not a day older, sitting next to him in the shitty roadside diner she tracked him down to. He’d spent a pretty long time positive that if he ever saw her again after she up and left them all on that beach that he’d tell her to fuck off but the anger isn’t what it used to be. Maybe seeing her in Vietnam helped with that, or maybe it's just time. 

She’s playing with her coffee cup while Alex picks at his pretty mediocre piece of pie, doesn’t stop to ask who she means. There’s a rolling in his gut that tells him he doesn’t want to know. “Trask found them, Sean, Angel. Even members of the Brotherhood. He killed them. He was looking for mutants to make his weapons.” She looks at him with pretty blue eyes that look just like Charles’ and Alex wonders if she does that on purpose or if she doesn’t know she does it at all. 

“Makes you miss the old days doesn’t it?” He deadpans, uncomfortable with how much he means it. 

“That wasn’t real,” Raven says, her expression at odds with the face she’s wearing, hard edged and sharp. “Those months we spent there. The compound. Thinking we could save the world together. None of that was real.”

Alex thinks of her irritating optimism, her teasing laughter, the arrogant certainty in her voice when she’d called him Havok for the first time. She’s probably right. 

“Yeah, but it wasn’t all fake either.” He says softly, like it hurts to admit it, turning the fork over in his fingers. He wonders if Raven’s forgotten Sean’s dopey laugh or Angel’s sarcasm or Hank’s excited rambling speeches as he explained how something worked. If she ever gets scared she won’t remember how Darwin smiled or the sound of his voice. 

(What was she going to kill Trask for if not for that?)

“When are you going back to New York?” She asks, judgement clear in her voice. Alex recognizes Erik’s detached interest but Raven doesn’t wear it any better than Erik did back when he was throwing Sean out a window. 

He shrugs. He’s thought about it. But the thought of Xavier rifling through his brain, finding the memory of that bullet in his mind and asking him what that was is enough to keep him away. “Why? You looking for company?”

Raven’s eyes flash gold. “God, you’re still such an asshole.” 

-

“You can’t hurt me.” Armando says and it’s not overconfidence in his smile. Its kindness, and Alex’s hands shake, his arms lock at his sides, his heart accelerates behind his ribs. “You can’t hurt me.” Armando says and it might even be true, Alex’s has seen the way his skin ripples—to stone or steel or diamond, expands and morphs to whatever it needs to be to survive—but that doesn’t mean shit. Some things are only ever indestructible until they run into the thing that was meant to destroy them. Alex doesn’t want to find out if for Armando that means _him_.

Alex shakes his head, throat dry and sweat gathering on his upper lip, a firm no. No fucking way. Armando looks at him, calm and unbothered by Alex’s refusal. There’s none of the morbid curiosity that had colored the others’ faces when they peeked at him from around the cement walls of the compound. 

“You afraid?” Armando asks, dark eyes fixed on his, one hand reaching out, squeezing gently at his arm. 

“Just don’t want to get stuck scraping bits of you off the walls.” Alex spits and Armando’s mouth twitches into a grin. “Yeah man, I don’t want that either.” Alex is overly aware of Armando’s fingers pressing into his bicep. The warmth of his skin seeping through the fabric of his sleeve. “But I wouldn’t be offering if I didn’t think I could take it. You believe me?” Armando’s face is painful in its earnestness. 

Alex hates himself but he does. 

-

He’s not much of an older brother. He sees Scotty a few times here and there before Uncle Sam ships him off, comes back home to a headstrong kid he doesn’t really recognize. (“No!” Scotty screams when Mom tells him to come say hello to Alex, takes off running in the opposite direction.) 

“You could come home.” His mom says, tired and hopeful, her face wearing the work of the last ten years Alex’s been off getting sucked into fighting other people’s fights. She’s offered before, always a little skeptical of his stories about the school he worked at. “Take some time to figure out what you want to do next.” She runs her fingers through his hair, still shorter than he used to wear it when he lived here and he lets himself lean into the touch. He wishes he could have been a better son. 

That night he sleeps in a room that used to be his, in a bed that used to be his, in a house that used to be his. His dreams are still full of fire. 

-

“Where do you go?” Scotty asks, eight years old and made up entirely of elbows. He’s been surly all day, quiet and moody and too much like Alex for them to enjoy their time together. There’s ice cream smeared on his lip and dripping down his cone onto his sneakers. Mom would have flipped if Alex brought him home like this but Mom’s not around anymore to freak about the state of her carpets. 

_Where do you go?_ Scott asks but all Alex hears is _Why don’t you take me with you?_ Alex shrugs, his skin feels too small for his bones. 

“All over, you know, for my job.” That’s almost the truth. He still occasionally gets roped into helping Xavier with recruitment now that he’s gotten his school open again. It beats any of the odd jobs Alex’s bounced between since coming back and it's good to touch base with them from time to time, to walk the grounds and see all the new faces that have cropped up in absence of the old ones. Makes it feel like the world’s moving forward and sooner or later Alex is gonna be ready to join it. 

“Hey,” Alex says, trying the words on for size as they leave his mouth, “What would you say if for Christmas I took you out to New York? You could visit the school I used to work at. The Professor usually goes all out for Christmas.” Scotty will love it. It’ll beat being here now that Mom and Dad are gone. “I’ll talk to the Miltons, I’m sure they won’t mind.” 

Scott’s whole face lights up and for a second Alex doesn’t feel like such a fuck up. 

(But when December comes Alex spends Christmas day alone in a hotel room, shivering and sweating, clenching his fists to keep the pulsing throb of energy seeking to escape at bay. He calls Scott the next day but doesn’t know how to explain. _I dreamt of the jungle and people screaming and falling to pieces_. He hangs up before anyone answers.) 

-

The first time Armando kissed him—see there was a first time and a last time and Alex can’t remember the last time it happened because he hadn’t know he would need to. It was probably stupid, something small and easy to misplace in his memory, like the passing graze of Armando’s hand to his belly or the punchline to a bad joke told in the front seat of that cab--Alex digs his hands into Armando’s arms and holds on. Everything smells like burnt synthetic fabric and Armando’s laughter is sweet against his mouth. “Told you you couldn’t hurt me, man.” Armando says— _Darwin, adapt to survive, what a nerd_ —and Alex feels queasy and punch-drunk and like maybe he doesn’t have to be afraid anymore. He still is of course, because sixteen wasn’t that long ago at all. He still is because his whole body is overheated and he knows the exact spots where Armando should have broken but it’s an option now at least. Not being afraid. Who’d have fucking thought. 

-

He charges.

Armando was wrong all those years ago when he said they were different sides of the same coin. Action, reaction. It’s all the same choice. 

There’s someone, whoever it was that hijacked Cerebro and filled their heads and he’s got the Professor. And maybe Alex hasn’t always a hundred percent agreed with him about how the world can learn to coexist, mutants and humans acting like one happy family, but he also respects the man for what he does. (It’s not respect that makes Alex’s feet sprint down the hall but there isn’t time to stop and reflect on that. He works best when he leaps without looking.)

He shoots. 

The world around him reacts. 

-

“When I grow up I’m gonna be a superhero.” Scotty announces at six, watching some televised special all about how Raven didn’t shoot anyone.

“Yeah?” Alex asks, sitting on the couch with a bowl of cereal on his lap, watching his kid brother while his mom runs errands because it's not like there’s much else for him to do. He’d called the mansion after he watched the drama unfold on TV and Professor X had basically offered him a place if ever wanted it again, but for now he’s sort of okay hanging out here, trying to do what his mom said and figure out what he wants to do next. “What’s your superpower gonna be?” 

The possibilities are apparently endless as far as Scott’s concerned, he switches between turning invisible, flying, and being really fast.

“Like this!” He says, running a lap around the couch. “See! But faster!” 

Alex doesn’t know what the chances are that Scott will be a mutant too. Maybe he won’t. He’s got the dark hair and the freckles and Mom says he looks just like her dad. No one’s ever said that about Alex. Maybe Alex will be the only Summers who lucked out in the genetic lottery. 

“Maybe you could have really big feet and hang off stuff.” Alex suggests and Scott seems delighted that Alex’s playing along. 

“What power do you want?” Scott asks and Alex smiles through the achy feeling that rises up in his throat. 

“I don’t know buddy, how about you pick one for me.”

-

He hits the ground so hard all the air gets knocked out his body. He also thinks he might have broken every bone in his body. Inside his skull his brain slams into the bone, he’s pretty sure he hears it sloshing in his ears. 

Alex groans, tries to curl into himself but it hurts to move, hurts to breathe, and there’s someone’s hand on his shoulder trying to keep him from rolling onto his side. 

“Hey man, Alex, just keep still, just take a minute.” 

Alex remembers Vietnam and how his life looped inside his eyes, all his mistakes and his regrets and the things he’s left behind. He must be dying if it's happening again.

“It’s gonna be okay.” Says a voice Alex hasn’t heard in twenty years. Despite everything, he still believes it.

-

“You’re not gonna stay?” Scott asks. It’s hard to get a read of his face with the new glasses on, but Alex does his best. 

It’s weird to talk about leaving when it took them ages to get back here, between figuring out transportation to getting money to finally getting in touch with the professor without Cerebro or a working telephone to call (“Yes, it’s hard to maintain contact with people when your primary forms of communication are incinerated in an explosion.” “Er, yeah, sorry about that. I guess.”). But now that he knows Scotty’s okay, that everything is okay, Alex knows this isn’t where he needs to be. Not right now. “I’ll be back Scott. Promise.” 

He doesn’t know if his word means anything to anyone anymore, least of all Scott, so he reaches out and snags him by the shoulders. Scott doesn’t put up even a token protest, comes along easily when Alex squeezes him up against his side. Being presumed dead has a way of wiping slates clean apparently. Even Raven had cried when she’d seen him, launched herself at him and held him like Alex couldn’t remember her hugging him since the night Shaw attacked the compound. “What the fuck?” she’d demanded, punching Alex in the arm and that was all before anyone had even caught sight of Armando, hovering over Alex’s shoulder. Then things had gotten real interesting. 

That was nearly a month ago now and while Scott doesn’t seem to be playing the part of his self-appointed shadow anymore, he still seems unhappy with the fact that Alex isn’t sticking around this time either. 

“Hey, I’m not leaving today. Hell, I’m not even leaving this week. Hank still wants to run like a hundred other tests on Darwin and me before he lets either of us go.” Armando’s got twenty years to catch up on before they hit the road. It’ll probably be a while still. Scott still looks a little dejected so Alex adds, “What do you say to a little brother bonding time in that fancy training room you guys got? Might be able to give you a few pointers.” 

Scott’s mouth flashes into a cocksure grin. “Don’t let Mystique hear you say that.” 

“Heh, I’m not scared of her.” Alex shrugs, pulling Scott back towards the house. “You know in my day we didn’t have fancy training rooms. We had regular old weights. And Erik used to make us run fifty miles everyday, uphill, before the sun was up.” One day he’s going to tell Scott everything that happened before, tell him about the people whose names are carved into the base of the fountain Charles had installed in the gardens. They deserve to be remembered.

“In the snow?” Scott asks, his earlier seriousness mostly erased from his voice.

Alex pretends to sigh. “You know it, kid.” 

-

“Raven?” Alex says when he comes to, trying to get his eyes to focus on the guy sitting beside him in ugly green scrubs. (Hospital. His brain supplies though Alex isn’t asking. He’s in a hospital. Broken leg and dislocated shoulder and a collapsed lung, like his body remembered all at once what it means to be hurt. And stay hurt. Shit. He hadn’t missed it.) The whole place is a mess of people running back and forth, set on edge by the last telepathic broadcast that swept over them all, though Alex’s was maybe a little fuzzy what with the morphine drip attached to his arm. “Raven—what the hell?” He’s angry, under the drugs and the hurt, angry she decided to wear this face when she could have put on any other. His words slur together and he can’t get his tongue around the words he wants to say, has to settle for closing his eyes and turning his face away instead.

“Alex.” God, she’s using his voice too. He almost wants to laugh. Has she been practicing all this time? “Alex, it’s me. Don’t—don’t freak out on me okay? But it’s me. Really me I promise.” The hand that closes around his is warm and solid and sturdy and Alex can’t even grip it back, muscles loose and uncoordinated.

He keeps his eyes closed. If the world hasn’t ended by the time he wakes up, he figures he’ll yell at her. 

-

“You can’t adapt into a car jack?” Alex asks, lifting the car as much as he can. Even with whatever added boost in strength he gets from his mutation the car still weighs a ton and his arms are starting to shake. 

Armando doesn’t even stop changing out the busted tire for their spare, hands quick and efficient, which Alex appreciates. “Sorry my man, that’s not how it works.”

Alex is starting to think that Armando doesn’t actually know how it works, at least no more than Hank or the Professor did, not even after running all their tests. The best they could figure was a guess at what happened, how Armando’s mutation had turned him into pure energy, how Alex’s mutation must have absorbed it, that Alex must have carried him all this time until there was enough of a force to knock them apart. Alex doesn’t know what that means other than the fact that it was Armando that saved him in the jungle, that it was Armando that got them out of the mansion when there was no way of knowing if Alex could survive a blast like the one he set off. Alex killed him and in return Armando saved him again and again, and now Alex is standing here, on a mostly empty stretch of highway trying to hoist up the back end of a car so that Armando can swap out a punctured tire. 

Life is fucking strange. 

It isn’t anything like picking up where they left off. There’s twenty years and wars and losses and gains marking the space between the people they were back then. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be something different, something they can figure out together. 

“You almost done?” Alex asks mostly to be contrary and Armando barks a short laugh. “Getting tired old man?” He asks, wiping his hands on his jeans and pushing himself to his feet. He looks at Alex and he hasn’t aged a day, but then pure energy probably doesn’t, who knows, Alex didn’t ask Hank. His eyes are still dark and steady and calm. His smile brightens even more under the afternoon sun. Alex lets the car down carefully, reaches for him because there’s no one around for miles and pulls Armando in close. His lips are chapped against Alex’s, his skin sun warm under his palm. 

Armando’s fingers slip into his hair, tug a little at the strands that fall over his neck. “Your hair looks ridiculous.” He says teasingly with another small tug, and Alex’s laughter burst out of him, the taste of possibility thick on his tongue. 

end 

**Author's Note:**

> The working title of this fic was just Alex Summers Deserves Better. This title comes from a Mary J Blige song. 
> 
> Also: forever bitter that Darwin never came back and that the last we see of him and Alex is in explosions they could have easily survived or come back from. Let me just refer you to World War Hulk where Armando’s mutation takes care of him thru some shit.


End file.
